Just eat something else.

I don’t eat anyone. The story goes that when I was a toddler, my Mum was teaching me about animals. ‘That’s a sheep and we make jumpers from his wool’ she said, then my big sister adds ‘and then you eat him’. Small me cried and said I didn’t want to eat animals and it stuck. I was only little and that was my decision, the rest of my family were not and are not vegetarian. I also knew from a young age that we should always buy free range eggs.

Now, fast forward thirtyish years and I started volunteering with the British Hen Welfare Trust. I absolutely love the work that this charity do, but the views in this post are my own and I am not writing this on their behalf.

I never considered how cruel the egg industry is. In my naive mind, if you eat meat an animal is killed but milk and eggs just come from animals, right? Oh how wrong I was. I think very few people know that at just 18 months old, laying hens are sent to slaughter. No matter if they are caged or get to live a slightly more free range life, they are still killed. Eating eggs and products containing eggs absolutely involves animal death. You could even consider that as truly awful as it is, at least some chickens bred for meat only suffer for a shorter amount of time but that laying hens suffer for 18 months. Is this better, is this worse, should it even be happening at all in our modern society?

At the weekend, I was volunteering with a hen rehoming. The BHWT take hens who are destined for slaughter and find them loving homes to live out their retirement. They come to live with regular people just like me. By the way, the hen above is Wednesday, she has been free and living with me for almost a year. One hen we rehomed is pictured below. Just look at her, what does she make you think and feel?

This is Gloria and she now lives with two of our volunteers. Gloria hardly has a feather on her. Gloria is very pale and Gloria looks very sad. Gloria needs love and respect. We should never have done this to Gloria and millions of her sisters.

So why is Gloria like this? Well, when hens live in cages, they do not see the daylight and so are very pale. They have very little enrichment or space and are so bored that they peck each other’s feathers out. The new pin feathers are also tasty and contain nutrients like calcium so the other hens can peck them for this reason too, and so that new feather never had a chance to grow. In a caged environment, hens do not get to be hens and that’s really not ok.

Sensational Gloria! Just from my own little twitter and instagram pages, Gloria got hundreds of views and retweets and more importantly, commitment. So many people messaged me and said they never thought to check ingredients, and pledged to make whatever changes they could. This has just made me so happy. If we can slowly stop the demand for products with caged eggs in, then we can change the lives of thousands of precious, intelligent and beautiful chickens. Just stop and think, is eating that biscuit worth her suffering, or, could you just eat something else?

Being vegan. Oh now this can be tricky can’t it. Remember the outrage at the Greggs’ vegan sausage roll? Well, people went mad and wanted to boycott the shop, the response was absurd but let’s just think for a moment. It’s a pastry snack that tastes nice for a quid and no-one dies. The other version probably tastes similar, and someone dies. Hmm, not that complex really is it?

Vegans are just like any groups of people. Some of us you’re going to like, and some you won’t. Like football fans, some just like watching sports and some go to matches to drink and get in fights. At the heart of it we are all passionate but choose to express ourselves in different ways. The passion of vegans is for there to be less animal suffering and less killing, which really isn’t a bad trait in a person. I want to help hens and help people make better choices to help hens too and this is why I want to keep posting about hens like Gloria. The food industry wants to hide what goes on and consumers want to ignore it and continue buying cheap food. To an extent a lot of this isn’t our fault, we’ve been taught to see cats and dogs as pets and cows, pigs and chickens as food when there shouldn’t be any difference. Can you imagine how people would react if they saw a dog on a chinese meat farm looking as dreadful as Gloria the hen? Well, there would be hundreds more tweets and i’d need an assistant to reply. But please, hens are no different. I, and many of my friends, have been amazed at how different their personalities are. I’ll do a new post soon and introduce you to some of my current gang.

Pretty please, with cherries on top: Start looking at packaging and cut out things that use eggs as an ingredient, or only eat things that say free range egg. It will be better, for everyone.

Mother of Hens x